Nick Bruno picked up on my questions about blogging and how well we “know” bloggers. Interesting comments and conversation follow the initial post on his blog….
I was talking with another poet-blogger yesterday. This person was surprised at all the books sold from the blog s/he writes. I write here and yet am surprised when people come by to read this and when people mention in real life something they read on my blog.
Part of my own surprise that people read this blog arises from the small size of the poetry community. I figure there are only so many people out there interested in a poetry blog in the first place. To have a good number of them coming here is an honor.
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A while back Ron Silliman wrote (I paraphrase here) that when he started blogging he would have been glad with having his blog receive 30-50 hits a day. Well obviously his blog recieves much more than that. His site meter reads 1,216,421 the last time I checked.
When I started blogging I had no expectations. That my blog receives as many hits a day as it does still blows my mind. That it has a “readership” of sorts is very gratifying. No regrets here.
When it comes to blogging – know is such an odd but correct word. Thanks for the post and link.
I know of a lot of bloggers but the only bloggers I know are one’s I already knew from “real life.”
The only other po-bloggers I know are fellow MFA students and alumni, who I discovered had blogs after I met them in real life. That said, I think the question somehow implies a superficiality to blogosphere interactions. That just hasn’t been my experience. Rather, I celebrate the internet as a kind of confederation of special interest groups – poetry, unfortunately, having subsided to a special interest relative to mainstream culture. So, I’m really glad this medium exists – since I can carry on a much more broad conversation than if I were limited to only talking to (geographically) local poets.